The Monetary Value of Information: A Leakage-Resistant Data Valuation.
Stefan Barthel, Eike Schallehn · 2013
Abstract: The importance of information as amain asset of acompany or organization is widely acknowledged nowadays. The loss of or the unauthorized access to sensitive information are critical and can possibly send acompany into bankruptcy. Furthermore, the risk of information larceny ismost often not caused by adirect attack ofunauthorized outsiders, but by authorized extractions by malicious or unaware insiders passing data to unauthorized outsiders. Unfortunately, this problem cannot be solved by the typically used role-based authentication. The detection of malicious accesses based on typical access characteristics, which has inspired some research, is limited in its potential. Therefore, we present aconceptual approach based on the valuation of information, i.e., using adescription of the actual worth of data items within database systems. This allows to rate potential losses on the fly as well as preventing valuable extractions done by insiders. In detail, we describe amechanism called leakage-resistant data valuation that calculates amonetary value for every query and takes according action if the cumulated monetary value exceeds athreshold (per query or per time span). 1